CTR Down from 23% to 10-13%?

Anybody else experiecing same...

[deepesh]

My CTR went Down from 23% to 10-13% (and so the eCPM) in the last 2 days, I checked the advertisments are same which used to show on my site, I had installed a Adsense Click Tracking script, I don't think so but can it be a cause of the drop :-/

[dzcap]

Care to share some tips how to reach 23%? Are the traffic very very targeted?

[toldan]

How many visitors does your website receive monthly?

[thegreatpretender]

Same here. Drop from 20% to 14%. One thing I noticed, when my index loads for the first time it is showing psa.

[hunderdown]

10% sounds like a great CTR to me, especially if the site is more than a few highly focused pages.

Any changes in the nature or sources of your traffic?

How long have you had the site up? If you have regulars, they will pretty much stop clicking on the ads once they are used to them, so there is typically a drop-off early on.

And no, I have not experienced a similar dropoff., though Thursday and Friday of last week, during Thanksgiving in the US, I did notice that CTR was off a good bit. It has since recovered.

[deepesh]

I am receiving about 8000+ Unique Hits/Day and the ads are quite focused, also, I am not receiving traffic from regulars.

[toldan]

deepesh, are you earning over $10,000/month?

[Lexur]

I needed to re-read the topic's title.
On my sites, CPM just could go down fron 2.3% to 1.0/1.3%.

[wheelie34]

mine too has been lower than usuall, average before jagger was 21.6% with the best ever being 34% last few days has been floating around the 11% to 16% mark, ads are still well targeted though, eCPM has been all over the shop lately.

This months average ctr is only 17.6% with an average of 630 page impressions earnings mid $30's per day :(

[whitenoise]

CTR dropped from 1.2% to 0.7% here but earnings are on the up =)) It may have something to do with removing Adsense from a site that had basically died a death. Hopefully smart pricing has rewarded me with greater click value.

Hmm just re-read the last post. 600ish page impressions and $30? That looks very good to me as I am not getting that from 40,000 page impressions. Maybe I should switch to CPM advertising instead?

[GuruSense]

CTR decereases if adsense is placed on bad pages... remember CTR is only a bearing on your ads per page it doesnt mean too much, your CTR will go down if you get more page hits from repeeat visitors who use your site often and have already established where and what are your advertisements this increase of page hits and no clicks results in lower CTR it doesnt reflect on your income but however the issue then is that if you were to improve position of your ads so that your current visitors were to start re-clicking the CTR would increase and therefor your eCPM would rise , at the moment my eCPM is outstandingly high and CTR low. Easily make 100$ within the first hours of google reset.

[kartiksh]

23% wow! 10% is also what i can desire. I have avg. 2% CTR.

[caran1]

I normally have a CTR more than 10%, but today a visitor checked a lot of pages, without clicking, so CTR, CPM both are down

[hunderdown]

deepesh, I'll ask again, any changes in your traffic? Your numbers may be constant but if the mix of visitors is different then their behavior may be different.

[deepesh]

deepesh, I'll ask again, any changes in your traffic? Your numbers may be constant but if the mix of visitors is different then their behavior may be different.

No, the traffic is the same, I am getting the majority of traffic from same 3-4 sites from the last 40-50 days, it was first around 100$+/Daily then smart-pricing kicked in it went down to $60 now ctr went down and I am on $23/day with avg. traffic fluctuating only 10-20%

[hunderdown]

Hmm. Maybe you are getting some regulars--if those three or four sites aren't search engines, isn't it possible that you are getting some of the same people at your site? Or is it possible that there are more places where they would see the same ads that appear on your site?

[edited by: hunderdown at 4:59 pm (utc) on Nov. 29, 2005]

[RonS]

$100 on 8,000 visitors and a 23% CTR?

5c a click....BEFORE Smart pricing, then only 3c... owch

[caran1]

It could be that advertisers have reduced their CPC, they pay less, you earn less

[hunderdown]

deepesh's concern is a drop in CTR.

[Swebbie]

If you get mostly Google organic traffic, then any update that monkeys with home page or interior page rankings will necessarily change the make-up of your visitors. I've seen this before. Some major engine changes the ranking algo and suddenly different pages in a site are bringing in the bulk of traffic. That means a different "kind" of visitor in the big scheme of things, which will affect CTR. I'm not sure what you can do about it, because any change you make to the content on those pages will possibly lose you the better rankings. A conundrum.

[deepesh]

The traffic is not repeating visitors come to download they get it and never come back. Also, the sites I am getting traffic are not search engines. The strange thing is everything was fine and one day I installed Adsense tracking script and the ctr went down, NO CHANGE OTHER THEN THAT.

[hunderdown]

Could the tracking script be interfering with clicks on some users' systems? If the drop in CTR happened on the same day you started using the script, that would suggest that's the case.

On the other hand, I think Swebbie's suggestion is a good one too.

[RonS]

The change to the pages might have caused the bots to relook and perhaps they decided to change the keywords being targetted, as that's one major cause for a drop in CTR, poorly targetted ads.

I've had times when ads were poorly targetted, and it lasts for a few days then it comes back. It sure makes you uneasy the first 5 times it happens. But..... it happens. CTR goes through the floor for a few days, then it picks back up.

Strangely, or not, it usually happens after a period of unusually high CTR, almost like the system says "Hey, why is site X getting such good CTR? We better go re-evaluate!" LOL But aside from being paranoid.....

Watch for a few days and hope that it comes back.

Good luck.

[hyperkik]

Might it be a geographic effect? That is, many of your visitors come from a nation less targeted by advertisers, and thus see different ads than you observe when checking the site?

[bbunlock]

ok just want to ask, did you just put the reffer code on your site? reason for asking is that I checked my stats today and my ctr and ecpm is cut in half from what it normaly is BUT the earnings are roughly the same.

I added the firefox refferer code to my site last night on the menu so its seen on every page, now that is the reason my ctr and ecpm are cut in half but the earnings are the same.

just an idea, I was starting to freak out when I saw the stats but im ok now that I see the earnings are the same.

regards

[joerginase]

deepesh,

do you have two or three adunits/linkblocks on your pages? Did you use urchin / google analytics?

If so, it could be the same problem we have for a week now. Since we track all adunit-positions with separate channels we could track the dropping CTR to a huge drop in a singele adunit(down to 10%). That drop might also have been triggerd by some layout changes and subsequent mediabot visits as suggested in this thread.

Since we have some other significant tracking "anomalies" ( exakt 100% differences) in same page tracking channels (not so funny since we're talking money here) we contacted Google and got confirmed that nothing is wrong with the adsense code on our site. That suggests, something is wrong with adsense reporting? They're still looking...

See also:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Iguana]

Your users must be desperate to get off your pages to get 23% CTR - - perhaps your back button disabling doesn't work anymore?

(had to say it - sorry if it's not true)

[RonS]

That's not fair... I have a number of different sites, and a couple of them have CTRs in the 25-40% range, but see very very few visitors.. I would LOVE it if I could get them higher in the SERPS. lol
They don't do anything black hat, except the only navigation off the page is back to the main page or through an advertiser. They are landing pages from SERPs, they deliver great information, and when the user is done, they can click back, go to my home page, or leave via an advertiser.

Is there anything black hat about that?

BTW My other sites, which generate far more revenue because of much higher traffic, have CTRs in the 5-7 range.

[Iguana]

No RonS, nothing black hat about it on a very low traffic sites - but if you are getting 8,000 visitors a day as Deepesh says then it sounds dodgy.

But I'm only talking from my own experience where I get 10% clickthrough on certain channels with a few hundred visitors a day.

[RonS]

If my high CTR sites were to get placed in the top 3 on the SERPS I might actually get 8,000 visitors a day... would it be black hat then? I assume it would get the same, or very similar CTR.. who knows as someone else stated, it depends on what phrase the high SERPs placement would be for.

Right now my visitors are for verb1 widget. If they suddenly became verb2 widget visitors, the well targetted ads might be of no interest to them.

Anyway, I just don't know what volume has to do with the color of one's hat.

On the third hand, I thought the whole story didn't make sense until I saw that he offeres a free download of somesort.. those just GOTTA be low CPCs.

Good luck!